Private Demons

by Robert Masello

  Lucien wrapped the neck around his wrist, then hoisted the sack onto his back.

  “Now move.”

  With his head lowered, and his eyes fixed on the cracked asphalt, which soon gave way to hard-packed earth, Lucien joined the long, sad caravan leaving the capital, for the unknown horrors of the open fields.

  And the ruby mines of the west.

  It was his diversion to the mines, Lucien had often reflected, that had ultimately saved his life.

  It was his health, his youth, and his agility that had singled him out for these special duties. Working in the mines—though, in fact, they weren’t mines in the usual sense at all—required balance, strength, and a keen eye. Under the watchful supervision of the Khmer Rouge guards, Lucien and the other prisoners selected for this job stood for hours in swirling mud, sometimes up to their knees, playing fire hoses across the exposed clay of shallow hillsides. The runoff was channeled, sluiced, and separated into buckets of large and small gravel. The buckets were then hauled to a central shed, where the sorting tables had been set up.

  Lucien’s partner on the hose was a former fisherman named Hun; Hun, built like a bull, held up the body of the hose, which pumped water directly from the river that ran past the foot of the hills, while Lucien sprayed the nozzle at promising outcroppings. Bits of soil and stone flew off the walls of red clay, coating their bodies with a fine, hard grit, sometimes cutting their skin with a sharp edge. Their feet were planted in a torrent of running mud that sucked and swirled and eddied around them. The air was thick with warm spray, suffused with dirt and sand.

  At night, which only became official when it was too dark to see the walls of clay anymore, they were shoved into a long, rough hut raised above the ground on stilts carved from the local hardwood called mai tung. The walls were thrown together from bamboo and grass thatch; the roof was made from layers of teak and cabbage palm leaves. A guard, with an old but serviceable M-2 rifle, sat on the narrow platform that ran outside the one small door. Lucien and Hun slept on the floor, atop a thin layer of leaves and rags.

  One night, after all the others had fallen asleep, Hun nudged Lucien, put a finger to his own lips, then brushed some of the leaves away from a corner of the hut. Very gently, he pushed at a section of the bamboo wall, enough to show Lucien that it was loose and could easily, and quietly, be pried open. Then he covered it over with the leaves again.

  “But then what?” Lucien whispered. “Where do we go?” It was one of the great advantages that the Khmer Rouge held: The entire country had become a prison camp, and escaping from one area only led you, eventually, into another—and possibly one that was even more deadly and harrowing than what you’d left.

  Hun shrugged. “Downriver?”

  “Does this river lead to the gulf?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I was a fisherman,” Hun whispered.

  Lucien’s mind began to work on the problem. Escape was something all the workers dreamt of, but even dreaming was hard—the work was so relentless, so exhausting, so dispiriting, that it took all of one’s energy, and vigilance, just to stay alive another day. Planning an escape—how? where to?—was nearly impossible.

  But Lucien began to plan, all the same.

  The escape route was now obvious; it had to be down the river. Heading inland would only lead them back into the killing fields and the forced-labor camps. But the water route would be dangerous too—the river was treacherous, and filled with crocodiles and snakes. And once into the gulf, they would be at the mercy of the currents, the weather, and whoever happened to come upon them first; for that, Lucien would want either a weapon, or something valuable enough to buy off, or bribe, any potential captor.

  The weapon would be almost impossible to get; the thing of value wouldn’t be. Rubies and sapphires, in their rough state, went swirling past his knees every day. But he could hardly drop the hose, go down on all fours, and start sifting through the muck himself. Even if it were possible to find a gem or two that way, he’d be shot on the spot just for trying.

  His only chance, as far as he could tell, was at the end of the day, when everyone was enlisted to tote buckets of gravel to the central shed. There, the sorting had already been done for him—and the stones, though uncut, left in separate piles. That would be the one chance he had—and lest the guards happen upon the patch of bamboo Hun had already loosened, he’d better take that chance quickly.

  The next day, in fact.

  He didn’t tell Hun what he intended; he didn’t want to risk Hun’s acting any differently. Or revealing something under torture, if he did. Better, Lucien thought, to get everything in place, and then simply say, “Now.”

  As the following day came to its close, Lucien applied himself to his work with unusual vigor and intensity. Today of all days he wanted to make sure the buckets were filled with promising gravel. Through the swirling mist of grit and sand, he studied the clay walls, searching for any hard pocket of glittering, granular stone, and blasting away at it with the high-power hose. When the guard shot one round of rifle fire into the air to signal the end of the day, Lucien and Hun wearily cast the heavy hose onto the muddy bank of the channel they stood in, and splashed to the foot of the hill. Here, just short of the river, the catchment basins were filled with gravel. All of the workers were scooping up buckets of the loose, wet rock, then carting them up the hill again to the sorting shed. Lucien dug his own bucket deep, and slowly made his way up the rutted, winding path.

  The central shed was the only building provided with artificial light, because here it was most needed. The sorting tables were huge panes of glass—they had, in fact, once been the windows of a processing plant abandoned by the French—and were supported at each end by empty munitions crates. Under the glass, electric lanterns had been arranged so that their light shot straight up, illuminating the rocks and gravel from below. Workers sat around the edges of each table, looking for hints of color buried in the rough hunks of stone. Possibilities were pushed to one end of the table, where a guard scooped them into a separate bag, while the worthless detritus was knocked to the floor, and swept out later. Lucien would never be able to lay his hands on the more likely stones, heaped at the far end; his only hope was to spot something, and grab it, as he poured his own bucket onto the tabletop.

  In his first bucket, there was nothing—mostly sand and clay-covered gravel.

  On his second trip, a soldier just happened to stand by his elbow, smoking a cigarette, while he emptied what he had.

  On his third, and last, trip for the day, he had dug to the very bottom of the catchment basin, and then scooped up with his bare fingers several larger, and more promising, rocks. If there was nothing in this batch, he would just have to wait till the next day and start all over again.

  But the moment he entered the shack, and waited in line to empty his bucket at one of the tables, he sensed that there was something; he just felt, in his bones, that the stone he was looking for was buried somewhere in this sodden mass. One of the head sorters, a prisoner named Pran, gestured him over to the corner table. Pran used one of his own wiry arms to clear the table of the remaining rubble, then grunted for Lucien to dump his bucket.

  Turning his back to Pran, Lucien pretended to be having some trouble lifting the bucket. He let it bang against the edge of the glass, and then poured it out so sloppily that some of the gravel on top slipped onto the damp, but hard-packed, floor.

  “Watch it,” Pran complained. “How stupid are you.”

  Lucien, his head bowed as if in fear, mumbled an apology.

  “This is the last time I’ll call for you.”

  Lucien ducked below the plane of the table and began tossing chunks of stone up onto the glass.

  “Don’t do that,” Pran warned. “You’re going to crack the glass. Stop it.”

  But Lucien had already found what he was looking for—a granular lump of stone, the size of a large nut, with the tiniest hint o
f fire gleaming from within. He stuck it in his mouth and straightened up.

  Pran was watching him with a practiced eye. “You’re not usually so clumsy,” he said.

  Lucien, with the rock on his tongue, couldn’t reply.

  “You sick?” Pran asked, accusingly.

  There was no infirmary at the mines; workers who were ill or injured were simply taken to the river and drowned. Lucien shook his head no.

  Pran, a skinny man with bulging eyes, was still looking at him intently. Lucien knew that if the rock was discovered, he’d be killed then and there.

  A soldier, chewing a wad of betel nut, glanced over at them. “What’s going on over there?” he said, his speech slightly slurred.

  Pran didn’t answer for a second. He looked straight into Lucien’s eyes, and Lucien thought, “He knows. He knows what I have in my mouth.”

  “Nothing,” Pran finally replied, giving Lucien a shove toward the door. “This oaf is getting lazy.”

  As Lucien passed by, the soldier spat a gob of red juice into his face. “To keep you,” he said, “is no victory; to kill you is no loss.” Then, as an afterthought, he kicked him.

  Lucien didn’t even dare to wipe the spittle from his face, but simply continued out the door, his head bowed, his demeanor abject. His own victory would have to wait. But at least he retained—its harsh, oddly metallic taste filling his mouth—part of what he would need to achieve it.

  It wasn’t until he’d returned to the hut they all slept in that he was able to take the rock from his mouth and, after rolling toward the wall, examine it. The only light in the room came from the moon, filtering through the cracks in the bamboo walls and leaf-covered roof. But it was enough for him to see, holding the rock close to his eyes, the dull, red fire that burned within it, like a live coal buried in the bottom of a pit. Hun, lying next to him on his pile of shredded canvas sacks, was snoring evenly.

  It would be impossible to keep the rock safely concealed for another day. When he worked the hose, he was stripped down to a loincloth, and if a casual search of the hut turned it up, it would cost him his life. Tonight, though he might have wished for less of a moon, would have to be the night they made their escape.

  Feigning sleep, Lucien rolled over to survey the rest of the hut through barely open eyes. Everything was still—the prisoners, worked to the brink of collapse, slept like dead men, even in the oppressively hot and close quarters—and the guard too was probably napping on the narrow verandah outside. If Lucien could have wished one thing different, it would be the proximity of Pran, the head sorter. Usually, Pran slept toward the middle of the hut; tonight, of all nights, he had lain down only a few feet away from Lucien.

  Still, it wasn’t enough to make Lucien change his plans.

  Rolling back toward Hun, he slowly extended one hand and touched him on his broad, bare shoulder. There was no response. He’d have dug into him with his fingernails, but they had been worn down to nothing by the water and the work; instead, he grasped an inch of brawny flesh and pinched it as hard as he could. Eventually, Hun’s eyes opened, and he turned his head.

  “Let’s go,” Lucien mouthed.

  While Hun silently brushed the leaves away from the patch of loose bamboo, Lucien slipped the stone into a pouch he’d fashioned from his loincloth; the rock lay cradled against his lower abdomen, under a pair of ragged khaki shorts.

  There was a slight crackling noise when the bamboo gave way; Lucien coughed and rolled over, as if in his sleep, to cover it. Hun waited a second, to make sure nothing was amiss, then slipped his feet out first. Lucien watched him wriggle on his belly through the flap of raised bamboo, and when he had disappeared, Lucien rolled quietly toward the wall. He put his own feet out through the hole, then lowered them enough to touch the rough bark of the pole on which the hut was raised. Breathing a silent prayer, he pushed himself away from the floor, and out into the night. His feet were clinging to the pole, when he felt his hand grasped firmly from above, and held there.

  In panic, he looked up toward the hut.

  Pran’s face was peering out of the hole, his wet eyes bulging.

  Lucien, waited for him to call an alarm to the guards. He would sell out Lucien and Hun for an extra bowl of rice.

  But Pran said nothing. He simply held onto Lucien’s hand, and stared down at him in the dark. Then he gave the tiniest nod of his head, as if to say, “Go on,” and released him. Lucien scrambled down the rest of the pole, and squatted in the muck at the bottom.

  A second later, he saw a pair of feet come through the. hole above, and Pran himself was scuttling down the pole.

  He couldn’t believe his eyes.

  “Over here,” Hun whispered; he was crouched behind the camp’s electrical generator. Lucien crawled over beside him. “What’s going on?” Hun said, as Pran landed in the mud beneath the hut. “What’s he doing here?”

  “I don’t know.” But they couldn’t risk his being seen at this point. Lucien silently waved him over.

  They all crouched down behind the generator. Pran said, “I’m coming with you.”

  “No, you’re not,” Hun said.

  “Do you want me to raise an alarm?”

  “I’d kill you first.”

  Pran smiled. “So? You kill me, or the Khmer Rouge do. My eyes are failing; they’ll notice soon. They’ll drown me in the river, like a rat. I’d rather die this way.”

  “You knew this afternoon, didn’t you?” Lucien said.

  “Yes. I could tell you were up to something.”

  At least his intentions were clear; he’d had plenty of opportunity to turn them in.

  “We can’t sit here all night,” Hun said. Lucien sensed he was still in favor of dispatching Pran on the spot. “What do we do?”

  “We go,” Lucien said, “all of us. Down the river.”

  Lucien didn’t look at either of them again. He raised his head above the generator, and after seeing that the area was clear, he crept out into the moonlight. There were two wooden skiffs, one with a motor, that the Khmer Rouge used for patrolling the river, but he knew that those would be closely guarded. Better, he reasoned, to wade downstream until they came to the first fishing village—like most, it would probably have been decimated by the Khmer Rouge—and steal whatever they could find. It was all he could think of.

  Together, but keeping several yards apart, they made their way down the muddy slope to the river. There were no lights on in the mining camp behind them, and no sounds. In a strange way, security at the Khmer Rouge encampments was ruthless but lax: The prisoners were supposed to be willing workers, contributing to the new Kampuchea. Why would they want to escape from such a worthy endeavor? And where could they hope to escape to? The whole country was under Khmer Rouge control, and where the soldiers weren’t, the land mines were. What had for centuries been a land of warm smiles and soft breezes had now become, in a few short years, a place where the only real choice was between a swift death and a slow one. Even so, most people chose to prolong their ordeal.

  At the riverbank, Lucien turned downstream; in bare feet, he slogged through the marshy soil, thick with river grass and bamboo shoots, and away from the few rickety shacks that comprised the site. The river made a large, lazy arc a half kilometer or so downstream, and once he was past it, and out of clear sight of the encampment, he breathed just a little easier. He paused, in water up to his waist, until Hun, and then Pran, caught up to him.

  “Where are we going?” Pran asked.

  “There,” Lucien said, pointing to a small inlet further downstream. The moonlight picked out a tiny scrap of beach, with empty nets, and a wooden boat upside down.

  At the sight of the boat, there was no restraining Hun. With his arms extended to keep his balance, he waded quickly toward the beach. Lucien wanted to tell him to be more cautious, but Hun was already out of earshot. Lucien watched as he clambered up onto the shore, and then, at least keeping his head down, loped toward the upturned boat. He waited there
until Lucien and Pran had also crouched down in its shadow.

  Even before inspecting the half-dozen huts, Lucien knew that the village had been abandoned—or emptied. No dogs were barking at their arrival, no smell of wood smoke hung in the air. There was an almost palpable air of abandonment and decay about the place. While the other two waited by the boat, Lucien made a silent tour of the empty huts—in most, there were the signs of either a hasty leave-taking or a struggle. The few possessions the villagers had owned—pots and pans, mats and baskets, the small altars with incense sticks to please the Buddha—had been knocked about or broken. By the time he returned to the beach, Hun and Pran had figured this out for themselves, and were openly appraising the boat.

  “They left this one,” Hun said, “because it was the worst they had.”

  “Will it sail?”

  “It will have to,” Hun said, resignedly. “Help me get it over.” Putting his shoulder to its side, and with Lucien and Pran assisting, he rolled the boat over until its low keel hit the sand. One of the thwarts was broken, the stowed mast looked as if termites had been at it, and the sail was wrapped in a bundle under the plank that served as a seat for the tillerman. About fifteen feet long, it was what the locals called a hang yao, or long-tail boat—though it was a sorry specimen of its kind.

  “Can you put it right?” Lucien asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Pran and I will see what we can find for provisions.”

  Lucien had made a mental inventory the first time he’d inspected the village; with Pran in tow, he went back to round up the green mangoes, the string of dried fish, the canteen and water bucket he’d seen. Stooping to pick up a pack of wooden matches that he spotted beside a pile of joss sticks, he also caught the glint of a dull blade and found a machete under a discarded garland of sugarcane flowers. He wiped the blade on the edge of the altar, and blessed the Buddha for this unexpected gift.